Vesper's Goodbye
by Snowfallxo
Summary: JONAS. Because the only thing harder than losing someone you love is loving someone you've lost.
1. eternity

**A/N: Hello, wonderful world of fanfiction! This is a fic dedicated to the wonderful, amazing, and plobnrg **_**chibiyugixyami **_**(whose name I, two months later, can now spell correctly) and **_**silvereyed angel. **_**They are the bestest fanfiction friends a girl could ever ask for, and since they've been really kind to me, I've decided to be kind to them back. So here is your story, girls. It seems a little cliché at the beginning. I'm trying really hard for it not to be. The idea kinda is based off of some fanfictions I've read, a few of them on this site. So you all can go read "Lost Brother" and "Lost Lives" by chibiyugixyami and you'll sorta see where some of this plot comes from. Sort of. I promise, it's going to be different. I'm trying really hard. Below is a summary, and I don't own JONAS, so thanks for reading! (PS. Surprised by the Owl City reference? You shouldn't be. Just get used to them. They're plentiful.)**

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It's been three years, seven months, and seventeen days since Nick Lucas disappeared. It's been two years, eleven months and twenty-three days since he was pronounced dead by the police. And now, it's been exactly ten minutes since he was able to escape the people who have been holding him captive for the last couple years of his life. When he had been taken, he was thirteen years old. He was just beginning to find his voice and discover who he is in the world. But all that was ruined on the day he was taken. Joe and Kevin never saw their brother again after March 15th, 2006. And Nick would never want anything more than to break free.

The people who took him are part of an illegal corporation that he doesn't even know the name of. And while he was living in the shadows of secrecy, they used him and fifteen other kids his age as lab animals to test new drugs and such. Eleven out of those fifteen kids died in the labs. He survived, but not unchanged. The drugs he was given had mutated his genes, and now, Nick is able shapeshift, use telepathy, telekinesis, and mind control, and is virtually indestructible. Now, the head of the corporation wants to make these kids his minions, but they're stronger than that.

Now seventeen, Nick has finally escaped. But he's not the same person his family remembers. At thirteen, he was still a boy, but now he's seventeen and almost a man. He's no longer got his high voice and boyish face; he's matured and grown up. The only thing he wants is his family, but after he's changed so much, will they even recognize him?

But that's not the only problem. The Corporation isn't going to let these kids slip through their fingers. They're going to bring them back, no matter what the cost, no matter how many deaths it takes. If Nick's going to ever be able to return to his life again, he'll need to destroy the company who's made him who he is, and prove to his brothers, who are now famous and in a band that isn't their own, that he is, in fact, their brother.

One thing's for sure: everything is never as it seems...

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_**...so close yet so far, but in my heart you're here with me, you did not leave, you just went to live in eternity...****  
**_

When I was little, I thought that the scariest things I would ever see, hear, or read would be in movies or books. That was before my brother died. And if that was heavy subject for me to even think about, the (form) letter we received that was slipped under the door was dealing with the matter in such a light and joking way it was sickening. If they were trying to make it seem like a good thing that they had taken my brother, they epically failed.

That was three and a half years ago. He was thirteen years old when he was taken. I was sixteen, Kevin was eighteen. Now I'm twenty, and Kevin's twenty-one, soon to be twenty-two. If Nick were alive today, he would be seventeen years old.

My brother always loved music, so in honor of him, Kevin and I continued our band. Or at least tried to. That failed, but the record company liked us, so they merged us with some other guys, and before you could say "boy band", that's what we were, puppets of the American dream. Kevin and I took it all in stride, and at first, never missed a chance to bring up Nick and remember that he was the real reason we were here; after all, it was his solo project that got the record to notice us in the first place.

However, the record company didn't like us talking about "some dead guy" all the time, and threatened us easily – if we didn't stop talking about him, they'd replace us in the band. And that was that, our little brother's name was forgotten in Hollywood, and we were famous. The night before the start of our first tour, however, Kevin and I made a promise – that we would never forget why we were here and always, always remember our little brother.

But as we got older, the wisp of a memory I had of Nick seemed to get smaller. The farther we were pushed into the trappings of fame and stardom, the harder it got to remember his curly hair and brown eyes, so young and so innocent. He was so unworthy of death, and it was like his ghost was beginning to haunt me – because I had forgotten him.

It wasn't a ghost, though, because part of me thought that there was a chance that my brother could still be alive. I never brought it up, not even with Kevin, because I didn't want to be written off as insane. But anyone missing for more than eight months is normally pronounced dead, and now it had been three years. So what made me think that he was still alive?

Maybe it was because in every person I looked at, I saw bits and pieces of Nick. Kevin had the same curly hair (a family trait), Logan (our drummer) had his deep chocolate eyes, Cameron (the bassist) had his same passion for music that he had, and Ethan (keyboardist) had his sly, sarcastic sense of humor and awkward smile. Even in complete strangers, I saw my little brother. And something about all this told me that I would never stop feeling guilty about our loss.

And one day, while we were touring in New York, I saw a boy who looked so achingly familiar it made my heart hurt. A boy, about seventeen. Curly hair, brown eyes, same freckles, even. He was staring at me, at Kevin, wonder in his eyes and a look of longing upon his face. And I wasn't afraid to stare right back at him, wondering what made him so intriguing.

"Dude, snap out of it," Cameron said, waving his hand in front of his face. "It's New York. What's so exciting across the street?"

"Him," I breathed, not wanting to point. The boy walked at the same pace as us, as if he were following us. Behind him trailed two girls and another boy, who were also discreetly staring.

"What about him?" Kevin asked, following my gaze.

"He looks like Nick."

Our little parade of the five of us, plus our body guard, stopped abruptly. People wove their way in between us as everyone waited for me to stop staring at these people across the street. "Joe, I'm sorry, but he's dead," Logan said softly.

"You never met him," I snapped, looking to the drummer briefly. And when I looked back, he was gone, like a ghost of a nightmare or a dream. Like he had never even existed.

"Come on, Joe, let's go," Kevin said softly, pulling me closer to him. "Stella's waiting for us back at the hotel, she said she has some new designs to show us." Which was also just an excuse to see me again. We'd been dating for two months now. "Joe. Please."

With one final look back, I allowed everyone to continue. But the boy's eyes were so familiar... what was it about them that made me think that I knew him? Was it at all possible that the grown-up teenager across the street was my brother?

"Joe, you look like you've seen a ghost," were Stella's first words to me when I walked into the hotel room. She was by my side in an instant, holding my hand and squeezing it as if I were unresponsive. Around the room, measuring tapes and bits of cloth were strewn all over.

"I think I have," I breathed softly.

"He didn't really look a lot like him," Kevin remarked. "In some ways, I can see why you'd think that, but overall, you're just overreacting."

"He would be seventeen now, Kevin, it's not like he was going to stay thirteen forever." I sighed. "Of course he's not going to look the same. It's puberty, adolescence. I doubt that even if we heard him sing, he would sound the same. His voice would be lower. He'd be practically an adult."

"Who are you talking about?" Stella asked, picking up a measuring tape, motioning to Ethan to get up on a stool, and began taking measurements.

Ethan sighed. "Nick," he said. The name frequented our private conversations enough for anyone that was close enough to us to know exactly who we were talking about. The fans would have no idea; not many knew that we had a younger brother who wasn't Frankie.

Stella fell silent for a minute, she had known him, after all, even if the other band members hadn't. We'd been friends since we were five, since Nick was two. If anything, Stella would know how to deal with my problems if Kevin didn't. "Joe," she said finally. "Ever think about letting go?"

"All the time," I muttered as Ethan stepped down and Logan stepped up.

"We get good songs out of it, though," Cameron said with a grin, unwrapping a pillow chocolate and plopping down on the couch.. "Except we can't sing about death all the time. The record execs would flip."

"The record 'flips' whenever we come to them with a song that's even remotely personal," Ethan complained, sitting down next to Cam. "Because apparently we really shouldn't be singing about Fiona Skye or any other relationships." His eyes flickered to me. "Besides, Joe's always in the most intense relationships anyway. And everyone always breaks up with you because you're too moody."

"I broke up with Taylor." I tried to defend myself. That wasn't quite the relationship to use.

"And that's certainly something to be proud of, Joseph, breaking up with someone in a twenty-seven second phone call." Logan rolled his eyes.

I rolled my eyes. "Can we change the subject?"

And change the subject we did. By the end of the day, Nick was once again living at the back of my mind and everything was back to normal. I didn't think I would ever see that boy again.

And yet, I knew that I would. It was the beginning of something... I just didn't know what.

**_...looking at a picture of you in my hands, wondering if i'm ever gonna see you again..._**

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**A/N: Comments? Reviews? Ideas for their band name? I'd love to hear them. :) So press the green button below and leave your message after the beep! -beep- Whoops, the beeping machine is broken. So just leave a review. :)**

**This isn't as long as I'd like it to be, either, but... it's the start of a new story. The chapters get longer.**

**Disclaimer: I also don't own the lyrics to "Eternity" by the Jonas Brothers. Well no duh. I'm no freakishly hot guy from New Jersey. Probably just the opposite. .**


	2. a little bit longer

**A/N: Short chapter. I'm sorry. But I wanted to update because I've been getting awesome reviews and story alerts! It makes me excited. So yes, I changed the title, if you listen to the song with the same name you'll know why... plus, no offense to Adam Young, Nick Jonas trumps everyone. Except for maybe chibiyu and silver. Because they're awesome.**

**Disclaimer: Yes, I own stock, so I own Disney. Jealous? Of course you are. Fine, I'm kidding, I don't really own anything. But I like to pretend I do.**

_flashback_

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**when i thought it'd all been done, when i thought it'd all been said, a little bit longer, and i'll be fine.**

I didn't recognize them at first. They were just random people across the street, people I had never seen before, people I would never see again.

But then I started seeing things. Like one of those boys had the same hair that Kevin had when he woke up in the morning, before he would straighten it or mess it up somehow. The boy next to him had Joe's eyes. Maybe it was the way they walked or looked or talked to each other. I tried to ignore them, but then I met his eyes.

Joe. It was Joe. It just had to be him, my brother, my...

"Nick, stop staring, it's rude," Arie said, quite seriously.

"He's having a staring contest with that hot boy across the street, Arie, don't disrupt him," Silver replied playfully, silver eyes dancing. "Maybe, if Nick actually loses for once, he'll come over here and say hi. Out of pity. And then he'll meet me."

"Yeah, because you're definitely his dream girl," Arie said, rolling her eyes.

Normally, I would have snapped some stupid response at the two girls, but this was Joe and I didn't want to take my eyes off him. It was amazing how different he looked, how much older and mature he had gotten. Although compared to me, he hadn't changed at all. It was only through my eyes that I noticed every single little detail. Like how Joe might be in need of a shave or Kevin had this lost look about him that made me wonder what had happened to the boy who would joke around about otters that played trumpet or cloud-shaped bunnies. He'd grown up, that's what happened.

And I realized right then and now that I didn't know these people at all. Tragedy shapes a person, I thought, and the tragedy that had shaped my brothers was me. My kidnapping, my death, my short existence on this planet Earth. They thought me dead, and because of that, they'd been toughened. Strengthened. Weakened.

Did they even remember me? I forced myself to think. I could barely remember a time myself where my life wasn't one big stretch of torture and tests, of being different, of feeling lost. The only reason I remembered my brothers was because I longed for something better than what I had, and the little things that I could remember seemed like a ray of sunlight in my darkened world. When I thought of them, I didn't feel so alone, I felt like I had someone out there who truly knew me for the little boy I still was inside, the boy who never had a chance to be a teenager. And now, thrust into the real world with nowhere to go, the years of life experience that I missed seemed to haunt me. Because I didn't really know my family anymore.

Did I really want to go back to people I didn't know?

Maybe it was caused by panic, but I dove behind a car parked on the edge of the street, my hands shaking as I crawled. I didn't want to look at what I had missed, now I wanted them to leave. My emotions were so contradictory it was freaking ridiculous. I mean, I knew what would happen if I did the slightest thing as even talk to them. The executives, they considered this a game, cat and mouse. They let us go free, let us do anything, as long as we didn't expose what we were and we made no contact whatsoever with anyone from our past lives.

They played it like a game, a game with our lives and a game with the lives of those we loved. As long as we followed the rules of this game, no one would get hurt. That's why they did nothing about our escape. They thought that as long as they had something to threaten us with, we'd listen.

And they were right.

"Nick, what's wrong?" Silver asked, forgetting "the hot boy across the street" for a second. She could forget him. I couldn't.

I didn't want to start crying in the middle of New York City. I was a man, not a little girl at a Justin Bieber concert. Looking at the pavement, I whispered, "It's them." I leaned against the car and put my head in my hands. Joe. Kevin. Near, yet so far...

_A fleeting memory, just a wisp of something that had happened. I had been thirteen years old, innocent, and at the time, alone. It had been a little over three months since I had been diagnosed with type one diabetes, and struggling with it. I didn't feel like myself, I felt like nobody. Why me, I would think, but why not me?_

_On March 15th, I was walking through the park on another one of my pity walks, hands in pockets, head down. I hated what I had, what I was struggling with, and any opportunity I had to try and get help, I would turn it down. I just wanted to be alone, because no one knew. No one ever knew. That very day, I was carrying a guitar. I had written a song on the piano at home, and I wanted to try it out on the guitar. Sighing, I sat down in the dewy grass and began to play. A little bit longer, I hoped, and I'll be fine..._

"_Kid." A man, pale-skinned and sketchy-looking, walked up to me. I looked up, startled, at his form, clothed in a leather jacket and dark sunglasses. "You okay?"_

"_Yeah. Fine," I said bluntly._

"_You've got a nice voice," he said. "What's the song about?"_

_I glared at him, but I wanted someone to vent on. "My diabetes."_

_He looked intrigued, as if he was having some sort of idea, and squatted down next to me. "I could help you, kid. Me and my friends, we're working on a cure. For what you have. Diabolical whatever. We could help you. If you come with us." He noticed the way I clutched my instrument. "You can bring the guitar."_

_The fact that he didn't even know the name of the disease should have been a tip-off to me, but I was so sad, so lost, so lonely, and I wanted help. Could he help me? Lost in my own world, my own life. I was letting this disease, this diabetes beat me, and I was ready to give up, to let him win. He said he had a cure, a beautiful cure._

_I freaking believed him._

"Nick," Jayden whispered. I knew if anyone could comfort me, it could be him. Since I'd first met him, he'd been like another brother to me, even though we looked nothing alike. My hair was dark brown and curly, his was bleach-blonde and straight. My eyes were a deep chocolate brown (most of the time), his a light sapphire blue. But he was my best friend, and after what I'd done with my life, he was the only one I could truly trust. "It's going to be okay."

Jayden had a family, Jayden had a past. Jayden had escaped. Jayden had lost his family because of what we were. And I didn't want to take any chances with my own. Jayden understood that. He knew what a family meant. Arie and Silver were the two in our group who had no past, no one to harm if they misbehaved. One of three who went willingly to them. The other one was me. Me, so foolishly promised a cure for a disease I still struggled with. Me, who so easily threw his life away to this corporation.

"It's all my fault," I whispered. "I want to talk to them, to tell them I'm okay, but I can't... I can't..."

"I know," he said softly. "Nick, you don't want to risk that. You know what they will do to them if you do."

"I wish they'd hurt me," I said. "I wish I wasn't worth so much freaking money to them, that my death wouldn't mean anything."

Arie and Silver, knowledgeably, stepped back and leaned nonchalantly against a building and began to talk about something while Jayden tried to comfort me. But I let the tears come, I let myself be that girl, crying over that popstar. That popstar who I would never get to meet. Never mind that they were my brothers. Never mind that they thought I was dead. I would never talk to them. There were days where I wished that I would be the ones girls were crying over. Now I was the one crying, and I sacrificed my pride.

When I finally stood up again, they were gone. "Let's go," I said, and walked in the opposite direction, towards Central Park, towards nothing.

"_What are you doing with me?" I screeched, the first night. They'd lied to me, they'd promised me a cure and I got burned, tortured._

"_Nicholas," someone said, the man who had convinced me, sweet-talked me into going. "You are the first of many. You are helping us test out a new... immunity vaccine." The hesitation made me nervous. "If all goes well, you will be stronger, a better man."_

_I wiped tears from my eyes and struggled against the man who was holding me. "I'm not a man, I'm a teenager, still a kid. I don't want that! You promised me a _cure._"_

"_We are sorry, but that may be a promise we are not able to keep." The man came to me, lifted my chin up and looked me in the eye. "This will strengthen you, and give you abilities that you have only dreamed of. Nicholas, please. There is a chance that a cure may be part of this." The ending was tacked on as an afterthought, and I recognized that. I knew he didn't mean it._

"_It's not like I have a choice," I muttered, and rolled up my sleeve and prepared myself for the shot that would change my life._

There are days where I wished I died in those labs, through the testing. That I had done a better job of resisting their efforts to make me do what I could now do. But the only thing that kept me clinging onto life was that one hope that I would get to see my family again, to talk to them, to let them know how I felt...

As I slowly walked into the park, I looked to the sky and saw the sky and the sun, shining brightly, even as everything to me felt so dark, as if that light inside my head had burned out. Everything was so dark, so lonely, and there truly was no possibility for a cure.

What had I done with my life?

**all this time goes by, still no reason why, a little bit longer, and i'll be fine.**


	3. dear vienna

**A/N: One of those chapters where it's just an author's note. I hate these, but since I haven't updated anything in a while, I feel like I owe a lot of you a really good excuse.**

**I've had this really big research paper that I've had research to do and now an outline, and I haven't really been able to get on and type stuff up. I will assure you, though, I have been writing A LOT. I have finished Behind Enemy Lines (very excited!), started the sequel, currently titled "Black, White, and Technicolor", written two chapters of Vespers Goodbye, one chapter of Lines, Vines, and Ocean Eyes, and one chapter of Chasing Stars and Losing Shadows: Fly With Me. So I have a lot to type up and no time to do it in.**

**I do want to thank everyone who reviewed "The Offseason". That was started after the concert and then finished with the rewatching of all my videos, which I will post eventually (along with an awesome picture of a genuine Nick smile, wide and toothy and so cute!) The Sox trump the Yanks any day. (Sorry Chibiyu, Paula, Nick, Joe, and Kevin... it's true...)**

**Just so I don't feel like I'm ripping all you off, here's a bit from the next chapter of Vespers Goodbye. (Told you, I hate these chapters.) If you want to review, I suggest logging out to leave a review so you can review again when I delete this chapter and post the real one.**

**So, without anymore blah blah blah, here is a small little bit of the third chapter, "Dear Vienna".**

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**then i reviewed every frame and basic shape and sealed the exits with caution tape.**

...After a minute of staring at what appeared to be nothing, he pointed. "Kevin, look. It's him again." The curly-haired boy was standing by a tree, an expression of almost anguish on his face. There was no one near him, he was alone, except for a black guitar case lying at his feel. "We have to go talk to him," Joe said, and dragged me over there like I had no choice.

I don't know if he saw us coming, but when he saw us arrive, the look we received was one of pure hate and total affection all in one. Why did Joe love being so friendly? "Is everything okay?" my brother asked, trying to seem helpful. I think all he did was come across too eager.

"You shouldn't talk to me," he whispered in a hoarse, low voice. His chocolate-brown eyes danced nervously, but I saw a glint of happiness and thrill in them, like he actually wanted to talk to us. It became apparent to me that this attitude and behavior was just a show. "Listen, I can't tell you anything about myself. You're in danger enough just by talking to me."

How exactly did he know that we wanted to know more about him? "I'm sorry," I apologized, glaring at Joe. "It's just that my brother thinks that you look like our younger brother who died a couple years ago, and..." I didn't want to say any more.

"I know." The deep brown eyes were now sprinkled with pain, and for some reason, his response didn't surprise me. At least someone who wasn't us remembered Nick. "You think you don't know me, and it should really stay that way. Even if I do know you." He looked away. "And I won't deny that I do."

"Who are you?" Joe breathed.

"I can't tell you." His eyes flickered from me to Joe and back again. "Not unless you want to be kidnapped like your little brother." He avoided the word 'killed' ever-so-lightly, but to me, it was so easily inferred.

"Why not?" Leave it to Joe to challenge everything.

He picked up the guitar case at his feet. "Because your life is something to be valued, Joseph, not something to be wasted."


	4. you found me

**A/N: Sorry for slow update, but hey, I promised a chapter today and I'm following through! I've had so many different ideas for this, and there were two ways for me to take it – I liked it better this way. For those of you who are wondering about updates on Sweet Caroline, that will happen in the next couple of days, and for Better Black and White, I have writer's block. Sigh. But enjoy this!**

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**chapter four: you found me**

_lost and insecure,  
__you found me, you found me  
__lying on the floor._

I'd done it to protect them. I had to do it, I had to lie, I had to make sure that they'd never do as much as think about me again. It was so hard, every step I took carried me away from their wondering gazes. Every step took me away from my brothers. Every step was more painful than the last. And as I walked, I cried. I hated this, I hated it all.

"Great job, Nicholas." I spun around to face three men in dark suits. Expensive suits. I looked down at my own clothes – the same ones I'd been wearing for the past week, torn and dirty – and wondered, to myself, just how many kids had been tortured to pay for those uniforms. One helluva lot too many. "I'm glad to see you're trying to follow the rules." The man in the middle took off his dark glasses to reveal a pair of sapphire eyes, ones I recognized to be genetically enhanced. "Unfortunately, you also broke them."

"They talked to _me,_" I tried to insist, but I was silenced with a flick of the wrist. Any survivor of his tests knew better than to try to protest. Anyone who didn't survive – well, something had gone wrong.

"Then I suppose they might be the ones to punish." He glared at me with those eyes, and I tried very hard to resist their hypnotic qualities. If he managed to get me under his control, then we'd all be dead.

"No," I whispered. "Please, no."

"Then you will take their punishment for them." He put his hand on my shoulder like he was trying to be civil with me. I glared at the hand but knew better than to even try to remove it. "Nicholas, as you know, I am a very busy man. I run a successful company and manage the lives of thousands of people looking for improvement. I cannot take time out of my schedule to deal with little experiments like you." He neglected to mention that I could have very well been the most successful of his "little experiments". I suppose that wasn't important to him, though. I was just another life to him, and he treated those like they were pennies in his pocket – virtually worthless.

"Then why did you?" I snarled.

"Because I have a little… let's say, 'surprise' for you and your friends. But since you're the only one here, I guess you'll be the only one to… 'enjoy' it." He motioned to someone – something – and from the shadows emerged my "surprise".

It looked like a mistake – it walked upright, like a human might, but it was covered in hair, maybe like a gorilla, and had long, protruding fangs coming from its mouth. Its colorless eyes locked on me and it growled once, waiting for its order. "This is my friend…" The awkward pause that followed told me that he hadn't given any thought to giving a name to the creature. If the poor thing had once been human, like me, it showed no sign of civility or any sort of normalness.

"I suppose its main mission in life is to destroy me?" I suggested, feeling like my life was becoming a lame sci-fi movie.

"You're a very bright boy, Nicholas," the president said. "The IQs of your prototype were off the charts. Not to mention your talent in music. But we have yet to test your ability to fight, to protect yourself. If you and your friends can even survive a fight with this creature, you'll truly be a success."

"My 'talent in music' was not the result of your genetic engineering," I muttered. "And I'm sorry, I have no interest in fighting this… thing to see if I'm a success or not."

He only smiled a sickly sweet smile and shook his head. "Oh, but Nicholas, you have no choice." He turned to the creature and gave it a signal as he stepped back into the bushes with his bodyguards to watch me fight his creation in the dwindling twilight.

It snarled, fangs dripping saliva. I tensed and stared right into its eyes, and for a split second, saw a flash of humanity, of recognition in them. Underneath all of the modifications, it was human, it was normal. But now its main purpose in life was to destroy me, to make sure that I didn't live. Mine was just the opposite. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the president smile, as if he knew I would fail. But there had been so many things that we were capable of that he didn't know about, so many abilities that he'd given us that he didn't know about. We never told him anything.

I put the secrecy on the line to save my own life.

The creature lunged, and I nimbly leaped out of the way. It tried again, but I once again dodged its grasp. I wasn't as fast as others, but still faster than an average human male. The third time, I wasn't so lucky. The animal grabbed me and pulled me in closer to its jaws, and now, looking into them, I saw its teeth lengthen and come closer to me. I tried to struggle free, but it was stronger than I was at that moment. There was so much more that I could do.

"Try harder!" I heard the president hiss to the creature, and it followed his order, getting back to his feet. Anticipating its next move, I managed to jump over its head, six feet off the ground and land behind it, kicking it over again. After the nose job I'd given it, it had been much less stable on its feet.

I was feeling so confident that I didn't see its claws. Before I could react, it had raked them right down the left side of my face and my eye. I lost vision in my left eye almost immediately, and the pain stung, but I managed to ignore it. I wasn't going to give up.

But it had the advantage now, and before I knew it, I was on the ground, and it was standing on top of me, one leg crushing mine. Broken. I felt confused, the pain was like a drug, and the loss of blood was beginning to get to my head. As everything began to go black, like in any lame sci-fi movie that was my life, I heard the president say:

"Leave him here to die."

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**(jpov)**

He lay on the ground, covered in blood.

So, naturally, I did what any person would do when they saw a kid lying on the ground, dying. I called for help. Never mind that thirty minutes ago, I'd asked him a simple question about who he was, and he'd snapped right in my face. But even now, his face covered in claw marks and welts, he still reminded me of my little brother Nick.

"911 dispatch, what is the nature of your emergency?" the operator said when she picked up the phone.

"There's a boy here, he's bleeding – he looks like he's been mauled by some sort of animal," I breathed. "He's unconscious right now."

"Does he have a pulse?"

I hesitated for a second – his neck was covered in blood – but pressed two fingers to his neck for a pulse. It was there, faint but there. "Yes," I said softly.

"Where is your location? I'll send emergency vehicles over immediately," she said.

"In Central Park, west side, I think," I said, looking around for signage. There was none.

"Stay on the line until the vehicles get there," she instructed. "Do you happen to know his name, or is he wearing any identification tags or carrying an ID with him?"

I searched in his pockets, but he didn't have anything in them. His wrists were bare, unless you wanted to count the gashes, but I caught a glimpse of something silver around his neck. A dogtag. There were three words on it, and they were not a name. "Type one diabetes," I read into the phone, and sighed. "That's all."

"Thank you," the operator said, and fell silent as I examined the necklace. Nick had one just like it, I recalled, and I wore my own awareness tag around my neck in his memory. Wiping the blood off of it, I fingered it in my hands, turning it over to the other side, only to find more writing. I caught my breath – it was a name.

Engraved in tiny, miniscule letters were the words "Nicholas Jerry Lucas". My brother.

Tears sprung to my eyes almost immediately. "Nick," I whispered. "Nicky, please. Hold on. They're coming, you're going to be okay." I ignored the little imaginary devil on my shoulder, taunting me, telling me that he'd flat-out lied to us about everything. He was my freaking brother, and I didn't want him to die, especially because he was my brother.

"You still there?" the operator asked.

"Yeah," I whispered. "Still here."

"Is he okay?"

"Yes." I rethought my answer. "Well, he's still alive. I wouldn't use the word 'okay' to describe him."

"They're almost there," she said gently. "I'm sure, whoever he is, he'll be okay."

I looked at my brother, dying, lying in the grass, bleeding to death, and sighed. "I surely hope so."

And after the paramedics came, it was all a blur – they lifted him up, they carried him away, and left me there. But I wasn't going to let my brother slip through my fingers again.

Sure, he told me to stay away. But I'm following him.

_where were you when everything was falling apart?  
__all my days spent by the telephone  
__it never came, and all i needed was a call,  
__it never came to the corner of first and amistad._


	5. headlines read out

**A/N: I decided I wanted to update so I'm going to. Mainly because I thought of something to write about! :D yay so yeah. :D read. review. all that.**

**

* * *

**

_can't you see that this is the proof you need?  
and all that has happened has had to be.  
can't you see that this is all we need?_

A nurse leads three teenagers through corridors upon corridors of white hospitals walls, rooms, and bedsheets on cots. Sick people lay in them, some smiling, some sleeping, many seemingly unconscious. And so many more doors were closed.

Silver's always hated hospitals – if she thought of it one way, they were the reason she was here right now, instead of with her parents… she had been nine, only nine. Her new family – Jayden, Arie, Nick – she doesn't want to lose them here either. She laughs at herself in her head when she uses the word "lose", like they're an earring or a favorite stuffed animal. Her parents aren't lost; they're dead. And the possibility of Nick following the same fate is just too big for her to think about. The beeping of heart monitors is no comfort – she knows all too well how the short, staccato beats can become a steady, constant tone, and a flat line on the monitor screen.

The nurse stops, finally, in front of a door, diverting Silver's thoughts from the possibly impending death of her friend to the fact that she's going to see him in a minute. "There's someone inside right now," she tells them.

Silver exchanges a glance with Jayden nervously. "Like, a nurse?" she asks quietly.

"Like, another person," the nurse replies sharply, imitating Silver's nervous use of the word "like", just like any typical teenager would use the word. They're hardly "typical teenagers", but sometimes it's nice to pretend they are. "He's about twenty, with dark, shaggy curly hair. He looks more like a relative to the patient than _you _three."

"We're distant relatives," Arie reminds her. "May we go in?" This was a lie, of course, but what isn't a lie now? Silver wonders to herself.

The nurse shrugs. "Sure, whatever," she mutters, and stalks off, leaving them there. Slowly, Silver reaches outward and twists the door handle, pushing the door open.

The first thing she sees is Nick, sleeping (seemingly) peacefully on one of those hospital cots. Tubes and needles are stuck in his arm, connected to an IV bag next to his bed. The heart monitor beeps constantly, a normal heartbeat, maybe a little fast for an average human being, but normal for someone like him. Overall, he appears fine for getting completely mauled yesterday by _something –_ the scratches on his face and arms seem to be fading, and the cast on his leg seems almost unnecessary to Silver. He doesn't need it, he doesn't even need to be here. They healed fine by themselves.

It's only after her eyes completely examine Nick that she realizes and recognizes the boy next to his bed, fast asleep in a plastic chair. Like the nurse had said, his long curly-ish hair covers his closed eyes, a leather jacket wrapped around him to keep him warm in the heavy hospital air conditioning. He's wearing skinny jeans and black Chuck Taylors, shoulders rising and falling as he breathes.

Silver recognizes him instantly, not only from billboards and the television, but from the picture Nick always carried in his pocket. He's Joe Lucas, Nick's older, famous brother that's not Kevin. She bites her lip nervously. If he's figured out that Nick is his brother, then God knows what would become of him and the rest of his family. Nick wouldn't have let this happen on purpose…

Joe stirs in the chair; she holds her breath as he stretches and his eyes flutter open, taking in his surroundings. Meanwhile, Arie and Jayden have retreated to lean against the wall, leaving Silver alone standing between the closet door and Nick's bed.

He sees her first. "Who are you?" he asks, demandingly.

She doesn't want to answer that question. "How is he?" she asks instead, in a way that she knows will annoy him.

"Fine." Joe briefly looks to his brother, a flash of pining and brotherly love in his eyes. It doesn't take mind reading to figure out that he knows.

She sighs. "I'm Silver. Friend. That's Jayden and Arie." She points to the corner. Jayden gives a little wave. Seemingly friendly enough… for now. Because they're probably going to have to find a way to erase his memory later.

"Joe. Brother." Arie scowls briefly, looking to her feet. Yeah. This was going to be a problem, obviously. "So you… know him?"

"Um, yeah," Silver says softly.

"We've been locked up together," Jayden adds, maybe trying to get pity from the rockstar-brother of Nick's, maybe not. _Tested together, _he adds silently, a mental voice that both Arie and Silver can hear. He walks over to stand by Silver; Arie stays in her corner.

Joe scans them over, taking in their unfamiliarity and strangeness, _but_, he realizes, _they probably know him better than I do now. _He hangs his head and looks at his fingers, picking at his nails awkwardly. "Nice to meet you, then."

"So…" Silver begins, trying to seem casual yet failing. "Have you told anyone else about… finding him?"

He shakes his head. "Kevin doesn't believe me." His voice suddenly gets quiet. "No one does, really. And I can't even get them down to the hospital to visit."

"Joe…" Jayden bites his lip nervously. "I suppose you _don't _want to hear the same thing Nick said earlier, do you?" Nick's brother shakes his head rapidly. "Then I think I'll spare you."

"Why?" he demands. "I don't get it."

"'Course you don't," Arie mutters. "Mortals don't get _anything._" Which, of course, was easy enough for her to say – she had been the first one to be tested on. At _six. _She's never known another life outside the prison she'd grown up in – until now, anyway.

Joe doesn't seem to hear her remark, instead focusing on Silver and Jayden, who had just exchanged glances. "Um," Silver begins awkwardly, wincing inwardly when she mentally counts how many times she's said that. "It's difficult to, um, explain."

"What Silver's _trying _to say is…" Jayden pauses to glare at his friend as if she's said too much. She glares right back, knowing full well he was going to. "…we can't really tell you without, well, putting you in danger."

"Which is what I got from Nick, earlier, except he was a whole lot more blunt about it," Joe points out. "What's the deal with you guys? He's been gone for three years, and he comes back all… changed."

"He's not… 'back'," Silver says. "Nick knows full well he can't stay."

"He's _unconscious,_" he replies.

Arie steps forward. "Joseph," she begins, staring straight at him with her most intimidating glare, only beaten by Silver's own silvery stare. "We're not… like you, in more ways than not. We're dangerous, and the people who are looking for us are even more so. Nick just doesn't want to put you in danger, and neither do we."

"What danger?" Joe presses.

No one responds. Jayden and Silver look away in opposite directions, and Arie's staring out the window. "Shit," she mutters after a couple of seconds, catching everyone else's attention. A single glance sent to her friends tell them everything: someone's seen them in here, with Joe, with Nick.

"Listen to me, Joseph," Arie says quickly, in a hushed tone. "I really hate to do this, but…" She pauses. "They've seen us in here."

"Who's 'they'?" Joe asks, obviously confused.

"The people who kidnapped us, kidnapped your brother. And they don't want us talking to you, or to any of our families." She stops again, as if thinking of her own family, one she couldn't remember. Jayden's blue eyes are closed, a tear sliding down his cheek. Silver tries to keep her own composure by squeezing the foot of the cot where Nick was sleeping. "Joe, they'll kill you if they think you know anything."

"But I don't."

"But even if they believe you do, they will." Jayden looked him in the eye. "It happened to my family, and I don't want it to happen with Nick's."

Joe's eyes found an interesting dust bunny on the floor and stared at it for a while. "So what are you going to do?" he asked, quietly.

"Kidnap you," Arie replies, maybe a little too brightly.

"Always one for evil plans, aren't you?" Silver snaps to her friend playfully. Arie grins.

"Haha, um, no," Joe says, getting up out of his chair. "There's no way I'm coming with you." He starts to head to the door, but to his bewilderment, Jayden's already in front of it. The blonde-haired boy looks from the door handle, to Joe, then back again, then sighs and steps away from it.

"If you end up dead, Nick's going to kill us," he says softly. "But I guess it's your life to waste, not ours to save."

Joe ignores him; instead he looks to his brother, lying motionless on the bed, sighs, and opens the door, walking out as quickly as he seemed to be able to do without actually running.

"That went well," Arie mutters, sitting down in the now-empty plastic chair.

"I don't think he likes us very much," Silver says. "Thanks to little-miss-'we're-gonna-kidnap-you' over here."

"Does it matter?" Jayden asks softly. "With the decision he made, he doesn't have much longer to live. And I call not telling Nick that we, indirectly, killed his brother."

As if on cue, Nick's eyelashes flutter, and the door swings open.

_so where's the upside to this story,  
or the obvious typical ending?  
were we poisoned from the start?_

_

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_**A/N: So hi. This is really bad writing, I think the end feels rushed, but here it is. I don't own the song "Headlines Read Out..." by We the Kings (in italics), which doesn't really fit too too well but I'm trying to keep up a pattern ;) I also don't own Jonas. Like duhh.**

**I'll try to update more often, but here's the thing. There are 14 favorites and 20 story alerts on this story. So, technically, I should get at least twenty reviews if ALL of you are nice... but that's pushing it, so I'll ask for five and then, only if I get five, I'll try very very very very hard to write another chapter. If I get less, I'll probably get another chapter to you, I don't know, probably in the next month. I hate asking for reviews, but at this point, with 20 story alerts, 5 is only 1/4. SIMPLE MATH. Please? It would make me happy and ENCOURAGE ME to write another chapter.**

**Or, if all else fails, follow me on twitter (flyxwithxme) and badger me there. ;)**

**kthanks, kbye. ~Snowy**

**P.S. For all who care (which is a total of no one): SEVEN DAYS. Until what? Until I'm seeing my favorite band live! (hint: not Adam Young. Meaning not Sky Sailing, Seagull Orchestra, Port Blue, the ever-famous Owl City of Fireflies fame, etc, etc...) yeah um that was pointless so yeah I'm shutting up now...**


	6. fuzzy blue lights

_if I was walking through a sad art gallery  
__and you were driving through the night  
__i'd feel rather alone and ill at ease  
__beneath the brilliant showroom light._

I can't get him out of my mind. My younger brother, curled up on a hospital bed, half-dead and still dying. That image of Nick, curly hair flopped in front of his closed eyes, just about grown up; a man. Seventeen, not thirteen. The way the scratches, cuts, bruises, and injuries disfigured his face, his body. But he's still Nick, still my brother, and I'm still walking away from him.

Maybe he was right before, maybe his friends are right. Maybe even Kevin was right. Maybe I should stay away; forget about him. Pretend he never existed, just like Kevin, just like Frankie, just like my parents, just like Stella.

Thinking about that makes my heart hurt. I sigh dramatically, coming to a stop in the middle of the ICU waiting room. The receptionist doesn't even blink, and everyone else in the waiting room is too caught up in their own troubles to even begin to wonder what mine might be.

I look behind me, at the corridor behind the swinging hospital doors; at the nurses and doctors running about, the crying little girl and the man walking quickly towards me, eyes obscured by dark sunglasses.

We're inside. Why would someone want to wear sunglasses?

My mind tells me to run, but I'm rooted to the spot in pure panic as soon as my mind realizes that those eyes behind those glasses are staring at me. My head spins, and as I try to take one step towards the door, I'm pulled backwards as my life once again takes a turn for the weird.

"Where are you taking me?" I ask, trying to keep my voice from shaking. I stare helplessly at the nurses as the mysterious man, who looks an awful lot like a secret service agent or something, continues to drag me towards a destination I've already formed in my mind – Nick's hospital room.

Normally, if this was three and a half years ago, I would have happily and willingly gone back to a hospital room where my younger brother was lying. Dying. (Well, maybe I never would have left and maybe I wouldn't be doing it 'happily', but still, I think you get it.) But this is the present time, not the past, and reality seems to blur with an acting job I had landed last week; like someone wanted to combine the boy band concept of Big Time Rush with the depressing hospital setting of a show like Grey's Anatomy or House with my brother's "friends" playing the distressed, slightly insane criminals of CSI or Criminal Minds or something like that. What a soap opera that would be.

Most intelligent kidnappers probably wouldn't ask their victim's opinion of what they were going to do to them, or let them go. But thinking of it now, being abducted by them doesn't seem like such a bad idea compared to this.

"I warned you," the man snarls in my ear as he thrusts me back into the room.

"I've never met you before," I retort, trying to struggle free of his grip, but failing nevertheless. He was strong, a little too strong.

"Not you," he hisses. "_Them._"

I look up from his clenched hands around my wrists and into four pairs of nervous eyes, for the first time seeing fear reflected in the eyes of my almost-kidnappers. Blue, green, silver, and brown, all staring at me. Finally, I understood why, exactly, they didn't want me near Nick. Not only did I put myself in danger, I put them in danger as well.

"He doesn't know anything," Arie pleads.

"You're lying," the man says, still holding on tight to my arms.

"We're not," Jayden adds, rather desperately. I hadn't realized they want to save my life this bad.

"Technically, we are." This new voice I hear is rough and deep, so achingly and heartbreakingly familiar yet completely new. It's only when I think about it for a couple of seconds when my mind finds the person it had failed to recognize before.

"Go on, Nicholas," the man prods, and my brother (!) continues, sounding a bit hesitant.

"Well…" He looks at me, smiles a totally Nick-ish half smile, seemingly in spite of everything, his brown eyes still yet emotionless. "He knows I'm alive." My mind spins. At least he's no longer denying that he's my brother, that he's actually recognizing my existence in a _positive _way. Somehow I didn't care that they could be discussing the reason for my hypothetical death. The way Nick had said those four words told me that he didn't regret it. That maybe he was happy I knew.

"And…?"

"He doesn't know that part," Silver whispers. "Please. Don't hurt him."

I really hate not knowing things, but I know better than to ask what exactly they're hiding from me. Instead, I try to keep myself calm. It's fairly obvious to me at this point that this man can and will kill me. His hands are starting to get clammy on my wrists, and my heartbeat was pounding on quickly.

"I-I won't tell anyone," I stutter. "I swear."

He moves his hands to my shoulders, gripping them tightly so I'm still unable to escape. "If there's one thing I've learned over the past eleven or so years, since I founded my company, Joseph, it's that _you can't trust anyone. _Certainly not to keep your secrets, not to do your dirty work, not to do anything. I actually tried to trust these four _not _to tell anyone in exchange for freedom. And of course, like everyone else, they fail me."

There's really no point in asking how he knows my name, but I ask anyway. "I know quite a bit about you Lucases," he answers, "quite obviously, the most about your brother here – more than you probably know – but also a lot about you, and the rest of your family."

"You don't know the first thing about who I really am, Mister President," Nick practically snarls, using the title sarcastically. The nickname brought back unwanted memories. "You stalker." I stifle my laugh. "And you most certainly don't know anything abut Joe, or anyone in my family." He manages to keep his voice level, but if you look at his injured face, you can see him wince in pain at every word. Given, the fact that he's even conscious is great; the nurses had told me he'd be unconscious for days. But although he's doing well, there's never going to be anything to change the feeling I feel when I see him in pain.

My captor holds my arms again. "Maybe so, but actually knowing him might just be your downfall, Nicholas. Your weakness."

"What do you mean?"

He looks to Jayden, who looks at his feet. "He's your family," the blonde boy whispers softly. "He knows what he means to you."

"Didn't you have a family?" I ask, my voice trembling. "Don't you know what it's like to lose them?"

"Of course," the 'president' says gently, and for a minute I believe him. "I killed them myself."

Seriously. I should've seen that coming.

(silverpov)

Yay for predictable 'plot twists'. I wouldn't put it past Mr. Cobian, the 'president', to kill his own family. Most certainly not. "How kind of you to put them out of their misery of being related to you," I say, putting a hard, sarcastic edge to my voice.

"Thank you, Silver." He says it meaningfully, like he actually did appreciate my snarky comment. Naturally, it doesn't help Joe out much, meaning we'd have to think up a plan – and quick.

"You're welcome," I mutter, and pretend to examine my nails. Nick stares at his leg, obviously noticing for the first time that it's been put in a cast. I wondered how hard it would be to take it off later, trying to distract myself from my thoughts about Joe's impending doom.

"This isn't the point of this," Arie points out quietly. "Seriously, Mr. Cobian. He doesn't know a thing about… you know."

The man sighs and studies Joe for a minute, smiling when the boy shies away from his bright sapphire gaze. "You can't trust teenagers," he says finally, and Nick curses under his breath.

"I'm twenty," Joe mutters.

"It doesn't matter." Keeping one hand firmly clasped on Joe's arm, Mr. Cobian reaches into his jacket and pulls out a knife. Nick's brother pales. So does Nick.

"Kill me instead," Nick begs. "Please."

But he shakes his head. "You're too valuable to me, Nicholas." All four of us mouth his predictable answer along with him. That's what he had said before he and his men had killed Jayden's family, and the entire police unit of a small Nebraskan town. How many times at this point had we begged him to take our lives instead of those of innocents?

The knife glints in the fluorescent hospital lighting. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Jayden inch towards the red button that would call the nurses into the room. _Silver, _I hear Nick's voice in my mind, _just get him out of here._

_Nick, if we take him anywhere, we're going to lose our argument._

_We've already lost the fucking argument, he already thinks we're lying. There's no way I'm going to be able to flash him out of here, not if I've got this ten pound cast on my leg and I'm supposed to be unconscious. Silver, it has to be you._

Mr. Cobian pushes the knife up against Joe's throat, just as I launch myself at both them, knocking Joe easily out of his arms and falling to the floor. Probably not my most graceful of moves, but before we can reach the ground, I pull away from reality and into a different one, dragging Joe along with me. We land in a forest, far, far away from the hospital, just as my mind begins to clear.

I'm really no good at teleportation, but I hadn't been about to tell Nick that.

"Where are we..?" Joe looks truly baffled. I didn't blame him at all.

"Can I see your phone?" I ask instead. Tentatively, he hands it to me. I make a mental note to break it before he uses it to call someone, but instead open the GPS app. "Otawonna, Minnesota," I reply, tossing it back to him.

"How the hell did we end up in fucking Minnesota?" he demands, catching the phone and stuffing it, rather angrily, into his pocket.

"Well…" I hesitate. "It's really a long story."

He raises an eyebrow. "Tell. Now."

I take a breath and close my eyes, and all hopes of him ever leading a normal life again went out the door as soon as I began my story, quite cheesily, with those four classic words:

"Once upon a time…"

_if you were swinging from the highway overpass  
__within the western hemisphere  
__i'd feel rather afraid and insincere  
__if you began to disappear._

_

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_**A/N: It's coming together. Ever so slowly.**

**I'm going to ask for five reviews again even though I didn't follow up on my promise last time. This time I have ideas and a weekend to write them in ;) so get reviewing!**

**peacelovejonasowlcity, lizzy.**


	7. brick by boring brick

"Once upon a time-"

"No good story starts with 'once upon a time'," Joe scoffs.

"Well, mine does. I'm not going to waste my creativity on telling my life story to you," I snap back, and begin again.

_she lives in a fairy tale  
__somewhere too far for us to find  
__forgotten the taste and smell  
__of a world that she's left behind._

Once upon a time there lived a girl who thought she'd be a princess. Life was perfect, as close to perfect as the life of an eight-year-old could get. Two loving parents, a twin brother (her best friend, although she'd never admit it), and really, everything else she could ever ask for. At that age, when Barbie dolls and Disney princesses take precedence over boys and rockstars, it was so easy to get lost in a fantasy world inside a little kid's head.

The day of her ninth birthday was the day that all changed.

It started normal enough, with Sam, her twin, tackling her in the morning, screaming "Wake up!" at the top of his lungs, still wearing his Superman pajamas. Breakfast was waffles, made with the Mickey waffle-iron the family had gotten on their first (and last) trip to Disney World. She picked out her nicest, prettiest dress and skipped around her room for a half hour, twirling and spinning, keeping that princess dream alive.

Maybe she should've known it was too good to last.

They were called out of school that day to the news that their parents' building where they worked was under lockdown – a gunman had gotten in and started shooting people. Two were dead, three were in critical condition. For the two kids, that meant that their father was dead. Their mother was almost there.

The girl remembers going into her mother's hospital room, hand-in-hand with the elementary school guidance counselor, seeing her mother lying there motionless, bloody, and dying. She remembers tears, screaming, and the sound of a machine making a constant tone, like a blur of the beeps. A flat line.

And then she remembers the social worker, sitting in offices for hours, hand-in-hand with Sam, still crying. Foster home after foster home, they were always sent back again. It was always her fault, she knew, for being nonresponsive and locking everyone out of her room, spending hours sobbing and trying to live in the past. Not even her brother could break her silence, through her tears to comfort her.

One year and seven foster homes later, she runs away. To this day, she still remembers the color of Sam's eyes, deep brown and sorrowful. (She was named for the color of her eyes – silver.)

She hasn't seen him since. It's been eight years.

_it's all about the exposure,  
__the lens, i told her.  
__the angles are all wrong now  
__she's ripping wings off of butterflies._

"Three and a half," Joe remarks, bringing me out of my story-telling trance.

"What?" I ask, wiping a tear from my eye.

"Three and a half years since I last saw Nick," he says. "I mean, before yesterday. So I guess I sort of know how you feel." He's hiding something, I can tell, but reading minds is more Arie's thing, not mine, so I don't try to invade. "Every day, Silver, after you've lost a sibling, after they've been taking from you – it hurts, everything about it hurts. Maybe you don't realize what you did to Sam, but you realize what you did to yourself. And it hurts to be on the receiving end of it, to find that someone you love has been taken away."

He's right, and I realize that this is the first time in a long time I've thought about Sam. "That's why I regret it." I sigh, looking away. "Because sometimes, when I see Nick, and how he thinks – and talks, don't look surprised, the kid never stops talking about you and Kevin – I see who Sam could be today."

He nods, awkwardly trying to put his arm around me until I glare at him and he quickly pulls it away. "Keep telling the story," he presses.

I try to forget the pain this brings and press on.

_so one day he found her crying  
__coiled up on the dirty ground  
__her prince finally came to save her  
__and the rest you can figure out._

She runs, and keeps running for weeks, running not for the destination but perhaps for the journey. There was no destination, just a reason to leave, to go. And she never stops, because if she stops, it gives her a chance to think, and she doesn't want to think. For her, now, it's best to leave her memories in the past.

But her heart hurts, and it's no longer just for her parents.

It's a month after she first ran away that everything changes, once and for all. It's a month afterwards she meets a girl, a girl like her, with no family, no one really to live for, that she wants to live for, anyway. She lives behind a fence, in the dark concrete building some local told her not to go anywhere near.

And for a month after that, she keeps on going to see this girl – her first friend in a long time. Her name's Fawn, she's smart, funny, and she can do things that are absolutely incredible, like move objects with her mind and sometimes, shapeshift into a little deer, like her name might suggest. She sleeps on the porch of a vacation home, and steals food from wherever she can find it, but despite everything, this small Appalachian town begins to feel like home.

Then one day Fawn doesn't show up. And not the next day, or the next day, or the next day. She wonders if it's her fault, because everyone she seems to be around goes away and never comes back.

Everyone except for Sam. She left Sam herself.

She cries herself to sleep by the fence one night, trying to make herself believe it wasn't her fault. Raindrops kiss her skin, beading up and soaking her to the bone. She's cold, but she can't bring herself to move. Maybe she'd die right here in her puddle, and that would be okay. She'd be with her parents.

But she's not so lucky.

That night, a man finds her lying there. "Are you okay?" he asks in a sugar-coated voice. She shakes her head no, no, she's not okay, she's lost everything and everyone she ever cared about. "Would you like to come inside with me?"

There was no little voice inside her head telling her no, this man was promising warmth and that was good enough for her. She nods, and he picks her up and carries her inside.

Naturally, she wakes up in a dog crate the next morning, warm and dry yet captured. This is when things start to change – big time. All the other kids eye her enviously, and she stares right back. There's something weird about each of them – whether it's their appearance (some seem to be half bear or fish or something) or the way they act (twitching, etc) or something, they're all different. And when they whisper, calling her the new girl, they always imply that something bad is going to happen.

There were three girls, she learns, that went into the labs and never came back out again.

She knows that already. Within the first hour, she'd already seen one kid die right before her eyes. One of the weird ones – he had fur growing all over his body. She didn't want to end up like him. She'd already been labeled a freak before – all because of the color of her eyes.

Strange how here, she was almost normal. Normal until the day she was taken out of her cage for the first time and carried into the labs. She didn't even try to fight; didn't want to prolong the experience any more than was necessary.

"Good luck," she heard someone whisper. She didn't want to think about what would happen to her. All she knew was that it was going to change her life even more drastically anything ever did before.

_but it was a trick  
__and the clock struck twelve  
__well make sure to build your home  
__brick by boring brick  
__or the wolf's gonna blow it down._

"They tested on you?" Joe looks horrified. I nod, sheepishly looking away. At this point, this cold nostalgia is getting to be unbearable. "I mean, you _look _normal."

"Yeah. I was lucky." I laugh dryly. 'Lucky' is hardly the word for it. "I was one of the most successful prototype they've ever had. In other words, I didn't die." Pause. "All but four did." I choke back my tears. "Joe, you don't know how little of a chance Nick had to live going into this. I'm not going to call us lucky, but we were fortunate to live – if you call living like this fortunate."

"Live like what?" he asks. I already realize that I haven't really told him anything about us, but sometimes, like now, I just want someone to vent to. Innocent as he was, Joe didn't stop me two seconds into my story. He'd heard me out.

"Always running. Surviving. Sometimes stealing." He raises his eyebrows. "You try getting insulin from anywhere without health insurance."

He nods. "So, um, what happened to you? Like, because of the testing?"

"Well…" I hesitate for a second. Last chance to save his innocence. "I, um, it's, um, best to sort of, um, show you."

"Um, okay, um," he says, sounding both sarcastic and annoyed simultaneously. He's making fun of me, and normally I would be annoyed by that, if it were Nick or Jayden, but Joe just makes me giggle nervously and… blush.

Going through adolescence in a laboratory, I've never really had a _crush _before. This crazy kinda crush-feeling, heart-beating fast, dizzying feeling is, well, dizzying. For once, the first time in a long time, I feel normal, like every other girl who has a crush on some celebrity pretty-boy who has a killer smile and hair that he can flip out of his eyes.

Then, once again, I realize that I'm not at all normal because said pretty boy is sitting next to me on the ground, waiting for me to do something supernatural and impossible. He's also my best friend's brother, which is a different subject matter entirely.

I sigh, maybe a little overdramatically, because Joe copies me, and focus on a stick across the pathway that cuts through this Minnesota forest. Slowly, I'm able to lift this stick up (with my mind, it might be worth adding), and bring it over to drop in the rockstar's lap. He gapes at me, mouth wide open this time. I shrug and continue my story.

_well go get your shovel  
__and we'll dig a deep hole  
__to bury the castle, bury the castle  
__go get your shovel  
__and we'll dig a deep hole  
__to bury the castle, bury the castle_

She doesn't remember ever falling asleep, but she remembers waking up in a new room, a smaller one with a large window. That's all she cares about right away, is that window, a gateway to the outside – one that's been bolted shut and can't open.

Then she realizes that the door to her cage isn't locked.

Slowly, she pushes open the door a little, a little more, then all the way so she can climb out of the cage and stand in the stream of sunlight pouring in through the window. She stares out the glass, loving the sight of the Appalachian Mountains slightly blocking the sunbeams, the blue sky, the clouds, the everything about this.

"Hi!"

This new voice is confusing. She hasn't heard anyone talk to her like that here before – if you talked in the old room, they would take you out and hurt you. She spins around to see not one, but two different girls standing there, wearing jeans and sweatshirts like any other normal ten-year-old girls. She's wearing something like pajamas, but certainly not something that fancy. "Hi," she whispers back, trying to remember if the two girls had been there when she had first looked around.

"I'm Lizzy," the girl who spoke first says brightly, twirling her brown curly hair around her finger. "And that's Arie." They both are sucking on lollipops. She wants a lollipop.

"I'm Silver," she whispers quietly, cautious of new people. "Is it better here?"

"Than outside? Tons better." Lizzy's very talkative. Arie hasn't said a word. "They let us do what we want, as long as we don't leave. Although sometimes we convince them to let us do stuff. Like, with our minds."

"That doesn't sound weird at all," Arie mumbles. "Liz, she doesn't know anything."

Lizzy nods slowly. "Oh. Yeah."

"They changed us, like everyone else," Arie says. "But we don't look weird or anything. Instead, we can do stuff that they can't, that other people can't. And they probably changed you to be like us."

Silver looks away, her hands trembling. "So… I'm like you?"

"Probably," Lizzy says. "It's not as bad as the other people, I guess." She sighs. "I wish we could help them. But if we leave, well…" She motions to the plastic bracelets around her ankle, and Arie's, and Silver's. "They can find us. And they're not very happy when they do."

"We tried to escape once," Arie says. "But this other girl, Fawn, who used to be with us, she told on us 'cause she didn't want to come, and they brought us back and took her away. We haven't seen her since. Not that we want to," she quickly adds.

Silver nods, fighting back memories of meeting with Fawn when she was still free. "So…"

"It's the same thing everyday," Lizzy says. "Come on, we'll show you around. That's what we're supposed to do, anyway."

It is the same thing everyday, and for two years the three girls live together in the lab, going through periodic testing all for the price of a little bit more freedom than their more scientifically unstable counterparts, the kids in the outside room. Their routine is interrupted twice by the arrival of two new kids exactly like them, except for the fact that they're boys. Jayden and Nick are welcomed, especially Nick's guitar. Silver loves Nick's guitar, and the music he can play on it. So does Arie, who seems rather infatuated with the boy when she's not arguing with him about something or other. (The one thing they can agree on, it seems, is baseball teams, which still isn't an argue-free subject because then Lizzy makes a comment about how the Red Sox are better and it's New York verses Boston all over again. Not that you can even follow baseball in a laboratory.)

But science isn't perfect.

On Nick's sixteenth birthday, they find Lizzy dead in her dog cage.

And life as they know it ends all over again.

_keep your feet on the ground  
__when your head's in the clouds…  
__well you built up a world of magic  
__because your real life is tragic  
__yeah, you built up a world of magic._

I see I've once again scared Joe speechless and spend the next two minutes of silence wiping tears from my eyes. "I'm sorry for your loss," he mumbles finally.

"You don't understand," I choke out. "They killed her. They told us themselves. They wanted to see how we would react so they killed one of us. They're sick people, Joe. Don't ever, ever mess with them." I sigh. "But that's inevitable now, because I've told you all this and you know too much and they don't want anyone to know, so they'll kill you." I pause, maybe more for dramatic effect than anything else. "Or worse."

"What's worse than death?" he asks.

"Losing someone you love," I whisper. He opens his mouth to speak, I cut him off. I know he's lost Nick, that's not what I had meant. "Forever."

He's silent for a second. "Meaning…?"

"Kevin."

_if it's not real you can't hold it in your hand  
you can't feel it in your heart  
__and i won't believe it  
but if it's true you can see it with your eyes  
oh, even in the dark  
and that's where i want to be, yeah_

_...you're better off without me. _

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**trying to be evil like chibiyugixyami... failing I know. review please :) kthanks. love you all.**

**brick by boring brick -paramore. just so we're clear.**


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